1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to a printer apparatus connected to a host device in such a manner that bidirectional communication is possible, and more particularly, to a printer apparatus having a nonvolatile storage such as a flash memory, and a control method and an information recording medium for the same.
2. Background Art
Hitherto, some electronic devices including printer apparatus have stored information specific to the electronic device in built-in nonvolatile memories.
Japanese Unexamined Patent Publication No. 7-64735 discloses a printing device which is connected to a network and which stores the printer-specific configuration information transmitted from a host in a nonvolatile memory and returns information regarding the printer configuration stored in the nonvolatile memory to the host in response to an inquiry command from the host.
Further, Patent Gazette No. 2593844 discloses an electronic device having a nonvolatile memory built therein, and the nonvolatile memory has an apparatus information area for storing data specific to the apparatus, data being written to and read from the outside.
However, in the printing device disclosed in Japanese Unexamined Patent Publication No. 7-64735, the data of printer configuration information is stored in a predetermined block, i.e. data of a limited size from a predetermined address, allocated to the nonvolatile memory beforehand, and is read from the predetermined block, posing a problem in that it is impossible to rewrite or read a part of the information. For instance, in order to rewrite a part of the information, a host must read all the information stored in the predetermined block of the nonvolatile memory, edit the information, and write it back to the nonvolatile memory, thus making the processing complicated and taking a lot of time to complete the processing if the amount of information is large.
In the electronic device disclosed in patent gazette No. 2593844, apparatus-specific data is written to the area of a fixed capacity allocated to the nonvolatile memory in advance, presenting a problem in that a certain amount of memory is occupied regardless of the length of data to be actually stored, with consequent poor efficiency of utilization of the memory. For example, the information regarding the name of a manufacturer significantly varies in the length of data thereof, depending on each manufacturer, and it is necessary therefore to allocate a maximum width to the nonvolatile memory in advance, undesirably resulting in a large wasteful memory area.
Accordingly, an object of the present invention is to solve the problems with the conventional arts set forth above and to efficiently store a plurality of pieces of printer apparatus information in a nonvolatile memory to permit flexible change, addition, and readout of the information.